WE ARE way too far to declare we are safe from the coronavirus. While we have rolled out the vaccines and that we have prioritized health workers to be vaccinated, we are just testing how things will actually work. This means the so-called herd immunity doesn’t have weight on discourses at this moment.
What is worth checking at this time is how come we have returned to the old number in thousands of cases every day when we have actually reduced the cases in the past many weeks.
We can’t just be satisfied with the least view of the Department of Health that people may have developed the confidence that the virus is not around and probably because of eagerness to return to normal life.
We have been waiting for possible confirmation on the cause of this recent surge that some have attributed to the new variants that affected people without the benefit of confirmation coming from DOH.
It looks like our people and the government have relatively came in too passive about the developments in the fight against the coronavirus. For a period, we heard nothing about announcement from government reminding people that the Covid-19 fight is not yet over and that it poses a continued threat to anyone. Hence, down in the communities, it agrees with the reason of DOH that people failed even to observe the minimum health standards.
As it is going now, the numbers are increasing and we are again bound into the pit of uncertainty. On the side we depend on the vaccine as the only hope. Yet we don’t know how soon it could reach our country.
While we don’t know what’s next in all this, it could help if the health department could confirm if the rise in the number of cases is caused by the new variant or whatever is the reason behind this other than peoples’ passivity to observe health standards.
Also, the health authorities, even at the local level, could continue to inform the people through medium that could reach many in order to guide them on the state of this struggle against Covid-19.
It is not within the peoples’ wishes that they would be left presuming that everything is okay and be surprised with the new round of surge. Something could have been done in terms of bringing the messages based on what the agencies of government are doing during this pandemic.
Just like our dependence on the vaccine, we can appreciate the efforts of the national government to at least have them initially delivered and be used by our health frontliners. But we hope these could be delivered soon ahead before the surge could hit us harder.
Vaccines are the scarce resource the world needs and we are just but one of the least of many priorities. In the US, they are still hoping to vaccinate at least 70 percent of their population. In Europe, many countries are experiencing another surge in cases.
If there is delay in the delivery in our only hope to fight the Covid-19, then we don’t know what’s going to happen next.
When there was local transmission in Bacolod City months ago, some feared that with the uncontrolled number of cases, maybe even their pets at home could not be spared from the infections. We pray that won’t happen again.